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The Inbound Playbook

So you’ve tried just about every trick from ‘content marketing’ books to drive substantial traffic to your site, a huge effort indeed. But the question which still lingers on is, How much of the traffic were you able to convert?

Or in other words:

How many leads have you captured so far?

Or…

How many subscribed to your Newsletter by providing their email address?

How many downloaded a Whitepaper or an eBook after filling out their info via a form?

How many opted for the ‘trial offer’ in exchange for their personal/company info?

How many actually made a purchase?

One of the above actions, or let’s say any desired action which visitors to your site make is considered to be a ‘conversion’.

Bringing in more traffic doesn’t necessarily translate to ‘more conversion’. The only way to sustain profits and business growth is to make sure your traffic gets converted on a consistent basis, into more qualified leads and further on, as ‘customers’ of your products/services.

This is why Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) plays such a significant role in your Inbound Marketing performance and eventually makes the desired impact on your sales.

CRO is the process of optimising your webpages (home page, pricing page, blog, microsites, landing pages, etc.) to get the highest number of possible conversions. These pages which are pre-designed to convert website visitors into leads and customers, are taken up a notch via Conversion Rate Optimisation technique,; which are primarily based on results obtained from analysing user data, researches and testing performed on such landing pages.

It could mean anything from changing the colour of your pricing button to using text-based CTAs within your blogpost.

The following are some tried and tested tips to help you optimise your web pages and boost conversion rates:

1. Text based CTAs within your Blogpost

Including CTAs in your blogpost is a common practice amongst marketers however, placing your CTA banner at the bottom of the blog may go unnoticed as site visitors are increasingly becoming accustomed to scan and ‘snack’ the content as they prefer and may not read the bottom of the post.

The user behaviour these days has changed drastically to ignore anything that resembles interrupting adverts and banner ads, and your CTA banner at the bottom may also be ignored as another ‘nosey’ advert aiming at your pockets.

Also, it’s worth noting that tests conducted by HubSpot on regular end-of-post banner CTAs, garnered 6% of leads that the blogpost generated, whereas 93% of the leads from the blogpost were received from ‘text-based’ or ‘anchor text’ CTAs.

2. Monitoring user behaviour via heat maps

A great way to monitor and track your user behaviour data or to actually witness how the users interact with your site’s core conversion pages, is to run a heat mapping software on these core CTAs and landing pages.

Such behaviour analysis softwares and heat mapping tools gives you an aggregate picture of ‘click activity’ of visitors on your given ‘conversion optimised’ pages.

As you can see from the image above, the maps give you a clear insight into the elements of the pages which is attracting more attention and driving action (the ones glowing).

On the other hand, it also informs you of those confusing elements, which are getting plenty of clicks but aren’t actually clickable. A good practice would be to change those ‘unclickable’ segments into ‘clickable’ ones, as that could boost your conversion rates and capture the clicks, which is otherwise being wasted.

Heat maps can also inform you on how your users are navigating the site. For instance, when they read certain long texts it’s possible to determine where they stop scrolling and leave. An opportunity for you to optimise the copy or shorten the text for more engagement.

You can also see where most of the users are hovering around with the mouse pointers, looking for more info on the topic. You may also figure out the segment you believed to have garnered more attention is actually being ignored due to its odd placement in the navigational hierarchy (as like the CTA banner put right at the bottom of the blogpost). Here you can run tests on various versions of the page where the element is placed at different positions to optimize conversion rates.

3. Using different colour for CTA buttons

Some quick benefits can come from simply changing the colour of your CTA button. Yes, as trivial as it may sound, sometimes the colour of your button could actually be holding the visitors from clicking on it.

A simple change in the design is all it takes, after which you can easily test this easy CRO hack. If you’re a bit challenged in the design aspect, you can always try conversion rate optimisation platforms like Visual Website Optimiser, where you can split-test button colors via easy options and do not require a designer.

You should test the colours until you get the desired CRO rates or heat map traces. The common trend is to go with red or orange buttons, but it’s a lot safer if you test your colours as you go.

A good rule of thumb is to use complimentary button colours of your site’s primary color palette. Colours that are placed opposite each other on the colour wheel are called the complementary colours, for example, green and red.

The high contrast of complementary colours gives a vibrant look and the buttons tend to stand out and lift off the pages to trigger ‘clicks’ for better conversion rates.

4. Site Loading Speed

This tip has nothing to do with optimising your landing pages, but it looks into your overall website loading time. And as per Peep Laja of CXL, getting your site load time under 3 seconds is preferable, but don’t go above 7 seconds, as that means you’ll be losing money considerably.

Yes, people are simply too impatient now and any sites taking longer than ten seconds to load may have to lose the majority of impatient traffic, who would click ‘away’, even when they were already on their way to your site.

More than 75% of online consumers left for competitor’s site, rather than suffer delays.

57% will abandon a site if it takes 3 seconds or more to load

Now, how do we decrease our site’s loading time and increase traffic to optimise conversions? Well, first off you can start with testing your site’s speed with tools like Pingdom. It not only provides you with loading time and a graded scale of your site, it also lists areas where you can improve.

The above image is an example of speed test from Pingdom on Conversionxl.com. As per the grades provided and suggestions offered, you can optimise your site for faster loading speeds by minimising redirects, minimize page sizes, avoid bad requests, use less cookies, leverage browser caching, etc.

When it comes to Conversion Rate Optimisation, it all boils down to constantly monitoring user behaviours with analytical/conversion optimisation tools and performing sufficient tests to determine what works for your site and core landing pages, rather than acting on a whim and the success of other sites, as each site operates on different niches, audience demography and varied marketing platforms.

If you'd like further assistance or would like to discuss anything covered today, we'd love to hear from you.